With a sustained data rate of 186 gigabits per second, high-energy physicists demonstrate the efficient use of long-range networks to support cutting-edge science

PASADENA, Calif.—Researchers have set a new world record
for data transfer, helping to usher in the next generation of
high-speed network technology. At the SuperComputing 2011 (SC11)
conference in Seattle during mid-November, the international team
transferred data in opposite directions at a combined rate of 186
gigabits per second (Gbps) in a wide-area network circuit. The rate
is equivalent to moving two million gigabytes per day, fast enough
to transfer nearly 100,000 full Blu-ray disks—each with a
complete movie and all the extras—in a day.

The team of high-energy physicists, computer scientists, and
network engineers was led by the California Institute of Technology
(Caltech), the University of Victoria, the University of Michigan,
the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN), Florida
International University, and other partners.

According to the researchers, the achievement will help
establish new ways to transport the increasingly large quantities
of data that traverse continents and oceans via global networks of
optical fibers. These new methods are needed for the next
generation of network technology—which allows transfer rates
of 40 and 100 Gbps—that will be built in the next couple of
years.

"Our group and its partners are showing how massive amounts of
data will be handled and transported in the future," says Harvey
Newman, professor of physics and head of the high-energy physics
(HEP) team. "Having these tools in our hands allows us to engage in
realizable visions others do not have. We can see a clear path to a
future others cannot yet imagine with any confidence."

Using a 100-Gbps circuit set up by Canada's Advanced Research
and Innovation Network (CANARIE) and BCNET, a non-profit, shared IT
services organization, the team was able to reach transfer rates of
98 Gbps between the University of Victoria Computing Centre located
in Victoria, British Columbia, and the Washington State Convention
Centre in Seattle. With a simultaneous data rate of 88 Gbps in the
opposite direction, the team reached a sustained two-way data rate
of 186 Gbps between two data centers, breaking the team's previous
peak-rate record of 119 Gbps set in 2009.

In addition, partners from the University of Florida, the
University of California at San Diego, Vanderbilt University,
Brazil (Rio de Janeiro State University and the São Paulo
State University), and Korea (Kyungpook National University and the
Korean Institute for Science and Technology Information) helped
with a larger demonstration, transferring massive amounts of data
between the Caltech booth at the SC11 conference and other
locations within the United States, as well as in Brazil and
Korea.

The fast transfer rate is also crucial for dealing with the
tremendous amounts of data coming from the Large Hadron Collider
(LHC) at CERN, the particle accelerator that physicists hope will
help them discover new particles and better understand the nature
of matter, and space and time, solving some of the biggest
mysteries of the universe. More than 100 petabytes (more than four
million Blu-ray disks) of data have been processed, distributed,
and analyzed using a global grid of 300 computing and storage
facilities located at laboratories and universities around the
world, and the data volume is expected to rise a thousand-fold as
physicists crank up the collision rates and energies at the
LHC.

"Enabling scientists anywhere in the world to work on the LHC
data is a key objective, bringing the best minds together to work
on the mysteries of the universe," says David Foster, the deputy IT
department head at CERN.

"The 100-Gbps demonstration at SC11 is pushing the limits of
network technology by showing that it is possible to transfer
petascale particle physics data in a matter of hours to anywhere
around the world," adds Randall Sobie, a research scientist at the
Institute of Particle Physics in Canada and team member.

The key to discovery, the researchers say, is in picking out the
rare signals that may indicate new physics discoveries from a sea
of potentially overwhelming background noise caused by already
understood particle interactions. To do this, individual physicists
and small groups located around the world must repeatedly
access—and sometimes extract and
transport—multiterabyte data sets on demand from petabyte
data stores. That's equivalent to grabbing hundreds of Blu-ray
movies all at once from a pool of hundreds of thousands. The HEP
team hopes that the demonstrations at SC11 will pave the way
towards more effective distribution and use for discoveries of the
masses of LHC data.

"By sharing our methods and tools with scientists in many fields,
we hope that the research community will be well positioned to
further enable their discoveries, taking full advantage of 100 Gbps
networks as they become available," Newman says. "In particular, we
hope that these developments will afford physicists and young
students the opportunity to participate directly in the LHC's next
round of discoveries as they emerge."

This work was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy Office
of Science and the National Science Foundation, in cooperation with
the funding agencies of the international partners. Equipment and
support was also provided by the team's industry partners: CIENA,
Brocade, Mellanox, Dell and Force10 (now Dell/Force10), and
Supermicro.

We've all heard that no two snowflakes are alike. Caltech professor of physics Kenneth Libbrecht will tell you that this has to do with the ever-changing conditions in the clouds where snow crystals form. Now Libbrecht, widely known as the snowflake guru, has shed some light on a grand puzzle in snowflake science: why the canonical, six-armed "stellar" snowflakes wind up so thin and flat.

Few people pay close attention to the form that snow crystals—a.k.a. snowflakes—take as they fall from the sky. But in the late 1990s, Libbrecht's interest in the tiny white doilies was piqued. The physicist, who until then had worked to better understand the sun and to detect cosmic gravitational waves, happened across an article describing one of many common snowflake structures—a capped column, which looks something like an icy thread bobbin under the microscope. Such a snowflake starts out, as all do, as a hexagonal crystal of ice. As it grows, accumulating water molecules from the air, it forms a tiny column. Then it encounters conditions elsewhere in the cloud that promote the growth of platelike structures, so it ends up with platelike caps at both ends of the column.

"I read about capped columns, and I just thought, 'I grew up in snow country. How come I've never seen one of these?'" Libbrecht says. The next time he went home to North Dakota, he grabbed a magnifying glass and headed outside. "I saw capped columns. I saw all these different snowflakes," he says. "It's very easy. It's just that I had never looked."

Since then, he has published seven books of snowflake photographs, including a field guide for other eager snowflake watchers. And his library of snowflake images boasts more than 10,000 photographs. But Libbrecht is a physicist, so beyond capturing stunning pictures, he wanted to understand the molecular dynamics that dictate how ice crystals grow. For that, he's developed methods for growing and analyzing snowflakes in the lab.

Now Libbrecht believes he's on his way to explaining one of the major outstanding questions of snowflake science—a question at the heart of his original interest in capped columns all those years ago. Scientists have known for more than 75 years that at conditions typically found in snowflake-producing clouds, ice crystals follow a standard pattern of growth: near -2°C, they grow into thin, platelike forms; near -5°C, they create slender columns and needles; near -15°C, they become really thin plates; and at temperatures below -30°C, they're back to columns. But no one has been able to explain why such relatively small changes in temperature yield such dramatic changes in snowflake structure.

Libbrecht started his observations with the thinnest, largest platelike snowflakes, which form around -15°C in high humidity. Some of these snowflakes are about as sharp as the edge of a razor blade. "What I found in my experiments," Libbrecht says, "is a growth instability, or sharpening effect." He noticed that as a snow crystal develops at -15°C, the top edge starts to develop a little bump of a ledge, which gets sharp at the tip. Basically, the corners stick out a bit farther toward the moist air, so they grow faster. And a cycle begins: "As soon as the ledge gets a little bit sharper, then it grows faster, and if it grows faster, then it gets sharper still, creating a positive feedback effect," Libbrecht says. "In the atmosphere, it would just get bigger and bigger and thinner and thinner, and eventually you'd get a really nice, beautiful snowflake."

If this sharpening effect occurs at other temperatures, which is likely, then it explains how small changes in temperature can yield such wildly varying snowflake structures. "The sharpening effect can yield thin plates or slender columns, just by changing directions," Libbrecht says. "That's a big piece of the puzzle, because now you don't have to make these enormous changes to get different structures. You just have to explain why the instability tips to produce plates at some temperatures, and tips to make columns at other temperatures. The flip-flopping of the sharpening effect nicely explains how the ice growth rates can change by a factor of 1000 when the temperature changes by just a few degrees.”

Libbrecht can't yet fully explain the underlying molecular mechanisms that produce the sharpening effect or exactly why different temperatures lead to sharpening on different faces of growing snow crystals. "But," he says, "this is a real advance in snowflake science. Now you can explain why the plates are so thin and the columns are so tall."

Discovery is the largest collection of confirmed planets around stars more massive than the sun

PASADENA, Calif.—Discoveries of new planets just keep coming and coming. Take, for instance, the 18 recently found by a team of astronomers led by scientists at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).

"It's the largest single announcement of planets in orbit around stars more massive than the sun, aside from the discoveries made by the Kepler mission," says John Johnson, assistant professor of astronomy at Caltech and the first author on the team's paper, which was published in the December issue of The Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series. The Kepler mission is a space telescope that has so far identified more than 1,200 possible planets, though the majority of those have not yet been confirmed.

Using the Keck Observatory in Hawaii—with follow-up observations using the McDonald and Fairborn Observatories in Texas and Arizona, respectively—the researchers surveyed about 300 stars. They focused on those dubbed "retired" A-type stars that are more than one and a half times more massive than the sun. These stars are just past the main stage of their life—hence, "retired"—and are now puffing up into what's called a subgiant star.

To look for planets, the astronomers searched for stars of this type that wobble, which could be caused by the gravitational tug of an orbiting planet. By searching the wobbly stars' spectra for Doppler shifts—the lengthening and contracting of wavelengths due to motion away from and toward the observer—the team found 18 planets with masses similar to Jupiter's.

This new bounty marks a 50 percent increase in the number of known planets orbiting massive stars and, according to Johnson, provides an invaluable population of planetary systems for understanding how planets—and our own solar system—might form. The researchers say that the findings also lend further support to the theory that planets grow from seed particles that accumulate gas and dust in a disk surrounding a newborn star.

According to this theory, tiny particles start to clump together, eventually snowballing into a planet. If this is the true sequence of events, the characteristics of the resulting planetary system—such as the number and size of the planets, or their orbital shapes—will depend on the mass of the star. For instance, a more massive star would mean a bigger disk, which in turn would mean more material to produce a greater number of giant planets.

In another theory, planets form when large amounts of gas and dust in the disk spontaneously collapse into big, dense clumps that then become planets. But in this picture, it turns out that the mass of the star doesn't affect the kinds of planets that are produced.

So far, as the number of discovered planets has grown, astronomers are finding that stellar mass does seem to be important in determining the prevalence of giant planets. The newly discovered planets further support this pattern—and are therefore consistent with the first theory, the one stating that planets are born from seed particles.

"It's nice to see all these converging lines of evidence pointing toward one class of formation mechanisms," Johnson says.

There's another interesting twist, he adds: "Not only do we find Jupiter-like planets more frequently around massive stars, but we find them in wider orbits." If you took a sample of 18 planets around sunlike stars, he explains, half of them would orbit close to their stars. But in the cases of the new planets, all are farther away, at least 0.7 astronomical units from their stars. (One astronomical unit, or AU, is the distance from Earth to the sun.)

In systems with sunlike stars, gas giants like Jupiter acquire close orbits when they migrate toward their stars. According to theories of planet formation, gas giants could only have formed far from their stars, where it's cold enough for their constituent gases and ices to exist. So for gas giants to orbit nearer to their stars, certain gravitational interactions have to take place to pull these planets in. Then, some other mechanism—perhaps the star's magnetic field—has to kick in to stop them from spiraling into a fiery death.

The question, Johnson says, is why this doesn't seem to happen with so-called hot Jupiters orbiting massive stars, and whether that dearth is due to nature or nurture. In the nature explanation, Jupiter-like planets that orbit massive stars just wouldn't ever migrate inward. In the nurture interpretation, the planets would move in, but there would be nothing to prevent them from plunging into their stars. Or perhaps the stars evolve and swell up, consuming their planets. Which is the case? According to Johnson, subgiants like the A stars they were looking at in this paper simply don't expand enough to gobble up hot Jupiters. So unless A stars have some unique characteristic that would prevent them from stopping migrating planets—such as a lack of a magnetic field early in their lives—it looks like the nature explanation is the more plausible one.

The new batch of planets have yet another interesting pattern: their orbits are mainly circular, while planets around sunlike stars span a wide range of circular to elliptical paths. Johnson says he's now trying to find an explanation.

For Johnson, these discoveries have been a long time coming. This latest find, for instance, comes from an astronomical survey that he started while a graduate student; because these planets have wide orbits, they can take a couple of years to make a single revolution, meaning that it can also take quite a few years before their stars' periodic wobbles become apparent to an observer. Now, the discoveries are finally coming in. "I liken it to a garden—you plant the seeds and put a lot of work into it," he says. "Then, a decade in, your garden is big and flourishing. That's where I am right now. My garden is full of these big, bright, juicy tomatoes—these Jupiter-sized planets."

The other authors on the The Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series paper, "Retired A stars and their companions VII. Eighteen new Jovian planets," include former Caltech undergraduate Christian Clanton, who graduated in 2010; Caltech postdoctoral scholar Justin Crepp; and nine others from the Institute for Astronomy at the University of Hawaii; the University of California, Berkeley; the Center of Excellence in Information Systems at Tennessee State University; the McDonald Observatory at the University of Texas, Austin; and the Pennsylvania State University. The research was supported by the National Science Foundation and NASA.

Caltech's physical-sciences program is number one among world universities in this year's Times Higher Education rankings, sharing the top spot with Princeton.

"We're pleased that Caltech is recognized as one of the world's best universities in the physical sciences," says Tom Soifer, chair of the Division of Physics, Math and Astronomy. "We take great pride in our research and in educating the world's leading scientists of the future."

Last year, Caltech's physical-sciences program was second to Harvard. This year, Harvard drops to sixth while UC Berkeley, MIT, and Stanford fill out the top five. Times Higher Education has also listed Caltech as the top university in the world and has placed Caltech's engineering and technology program first.

In addition to physical sciences and engineering and technology, Times Higher Education World University Rankings 2011–2012 ranks four other subjects: arts and humanities; clinical, preclinical, and health; life sciences; and social sciences. Out of the top 50 physical-sciences programs, 27 are in the United States.

The rankings are based on data compiled by Thomson Reuters. For the complete list of the world's top 50 physical sciences-programs—as well as the rest of the rankings and all the performance indicators—go to the Times Higher Education website.

Ryan Patterson is no stranger to Caltech. As an undergraduate, the Mississippi native studied physics, devoting a good part of his last two years to doing research with Professor of Physics Brad Filippone, building an electron gun to help calibrate an experiment that analyzed the decay of ultracold neutrons. "It was a lot of fun," Patterson recalls.

After graduating in 2000, Patterson got his PhD in physics at Princeton, where he studied the elusive neutrino, a nearly massless particle that zips around at almost the speed of light. He returned to Caltech as a postdoctoral scholar in 2007, and, in 2010, joined the faculty of the Division of Physics, Mathematics and Astronomy as an assistant professor. His work and day-to-day life as a professor at Caltech is an entirely new experience, he says: "It's completely different. It doesn't even really feel like the same place."

Patterson's research focuses on the mysterious nature of the neutrino. Produced in nuclear reactions—such as in stars or in nuclear power plants—neutrinos hardly interact with anything. In fact, billions of them are harmlessly surging through your body this very second.

Most of Patterson's attention is now centered on NOvA, a new neutrino experiment that's scheduled to start running in 2013. NOvA will measure so-called muon neutrinos that are being produced at Fermilab near Chicago. One of its main goals is to learn if the muon neutrinos are turning into another type called electron neutrinos. Measuring how many of these transformations take place—if at all—will help physicists determine a parameter called the mixing angle. Knowing this number is key to some of the big fundamental questions in physics, such as why the universe is full of matter instead of antimatter.

According to current theory, the big bang should have created equal amounts of matter and antimatter. But when the two interact, they annihilate each other and produce energy, meaning that stars, planets, and us—all made out of ordinary matter—shouldn't exist. And since we do exist, there somehow must have been a bit more matter than antimatter at the beginning. "We should've all been annihilated at the beginning of the universe," Patterson says. "Neutrinos may hold the key as to why that asymmetry is there, and we're trying to understand that."

Vladimir Markovic comes to Caltech from the University of Warwick, where he was on the mathematics faculty for 10 years. He also spent time as an associate professor at SUNY Stony Brook. Having just arrived in Pasadena in August, the professor of mathematics is the newest member of the PMA faculty.

Markovic studies the shapes and structures of mathematical spaces called manifolds. (For example, a line is a one-dimensional manifold while a plane is a two-dimensional one.) For the mathematically minded, he's an expert in low-dimensional geometry and Teichmüller theory. In particular, he has worked with something called the "good pants homology," which involves a mathematical object with three holes that has the same topological properties as a pair of pants, which has a hole for the waist and two for the legs. He combines these structures, mathematically stitching the pants together at their holes to create new structures. For example, attaching two pairs of pants at their waists would result in a new structure with four holes (the four legs). "You can say that what I do for a living is gluing pants," Markovic quips. Gluing more and more pants together produces increasingly complicated surfaces, and his goal is to understand the properties of those surfaces.

Born in Germany, Markovic studied mathematics at the University of Belgrade, receiving his PhD in 1998. Math was one of his two passions in school; soccer was the other. Mathematics, he says, is also about competition—it's about seeking new challenges in much the same way that mountain climbers want to scale higher and higher peaks. "I like solving problems. It's really the big draw for me, and it's still what excites me."

Astronomers have detected massive quantities of water in a planet-forming gas disk around a young star. The water—which is frozen in the icy outer regions of the disk—could fill Earth's oceans several thousand times over. The discovery, published in the October 21 issue of the journal Science, could help explain how Earth got its oceans and suggests that our planet may not be the only watery world in the cosmos.

"This new result shows that the reservoir of water ice in such a disk is huge," says Darek Lis, a senior research associate in physics at Caltech and a coauthor on the paper. If other planet-forming disks also have such copious amounts of water, then there's a greater chance that other planets are also wet. "Water-covered planets like Earth may be quite common," he says.

To make the discovery, the team of researchers, which includes Caltech professor of planetary science Geoff Blake and JPL's John Pearson, pointed the Herschel Space Observatory at a star called TW Hydrae, located 175 light years away. TW Hydrae, which is only about 10 million years old, is surrounded by a disk of gas—just as the young sun was about 4.6 billion years ago.

The team found the water vapor—which previously had never been detected in the outer regions of such a disk—using Herschel's Heterodyne Instrument for the Far Infrared (HIFI). The vapor, the researchers say, likely is produced when ultraviolet light from the central and other nearby stars bombards large reservoirs of ice in the disk.

Lis, Blake, and colleagues estimate that the disk holds several thousand oceans' worth of water ice. The fact that there's so much water in this embryonic planetary system means that the outer part of the solar nebula—the gas disk that formed our solar system—could have been chock-full of ice as well. Such a large source of water was crucial for the creation of Earth's seas. According to the current theory of solar-system formation, water was scarce in the inner part of solar nebula, where Earth formed about 4.5 billion years ago. "Water is essential to life as we know it," Blake says. "But the early Earth is predicted to have been hot and dry." Earth's water, then, must have come from somewhere else. One likely source? Comets.

Comets, often called dirty snowballs, are chunks of ice and rock that orbit the sun in long, swooping trajectories. Because they spend most of their time in the frigid outer-edges of the solar system, comets can contain prodigious quantities of water ice, and collisions of a few million comets with Earth could have brought enough water to create the oceans. A few million comets may sound like a lot, but there was a tremendous amount of debris flying around back then, and with possibly as many as trillions of icy objects in the outer solar system, the researchers explain, only a tiny fraction would have needed to hit Earth.

If this story is true, ample water should exist in the outer disk where comets form—which is exactly what the astronomers just discovered in TW Hydrae. "These results beautifully confirm the notion that the critical reservoir of ice in forming planetary systems lies well outside the formation zone of Earthlike planets," Blake says.

The TW Hydrae measurements come on the heels of the discovery that the chemical signature of water ice in comet Hartley 2 is similar to the signature of Earth's oceans, published online on October 5 in the journal Nature. In the Nature paper, Lis and Blake, along with Caltech postdoctoral scholar Martin Emprechtinger, measured the ratio of deuterium (an isotope of hydrogen with an extra neutron in its nucleus) to regular hydrogen in water ice evaporated from Hartley 2. The ratio was very similar to the ratios in Earth's ocean water, supporting the idea that the seas did come from the skies.

Previous measurements of the composition of ice in other comets revealed chemical signatures different from those of our oceans, suggesting that Earth got most of its water from asteroids. These other comets, however, were from the Oort cloud, a distant collection of up to trillions of icy bodies enveloping the entire solar system. Hartley 2 comes from the Kuiper Belt, a belt of objects at the edge of the solar system. Therefore, Lis says, "icy bodies in the outer solar system—the Kuiper Belt—could have been the source of Earth's water. These findings are yet another important step in our quest to understand the origin of life on Earth and assess possibilities of life in other planetary systems."

Kip Thorne, Caltech's Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics,
Emeritus, has been selected to receive the 2012 John David Jackson
Excellence in Graduate Physics Education Award from the American
Association of Physics Teachers (AAPT).

Thorne has won many awards over the years—including the
1996 Lilienfeld Prize of the American Physical Society, the 2004
California Scientist of the Year, and a 2010 UNESCO Niels Bohr Gold
Medal—in recognition of his contributions to the current
understanding of black holes and gravitational waves. The
Jackson Award recognizes another aspect of his career: his
contributions as a teacher and mentor.

Thorne has been recognized previously for the role he has played
in the education of young scientists—in 2000, he won an ASCIT
(Associated Students of Caltech) award for his teaching of
undergraduates, and in 2004, he was honored with the Caltech
Graduate Student Council Mentoring Award.

According to a statement prepared by the AAPT, "Thorne has been
mentor and thesis advisor for more than 50 Ph.D. physicists who
have gone on to become world leaders in their chosen fields of
research and teaching. A list of current leaders in relativity,
gravitational waves, relativistic astrophysics, and even quantum
information theory, would be heavily populated by former graduate
students of Kip Thorne, together with other students who took his
courses and were inspired and enabled by them."

For his part, Thorne says, "More than anything else, the thing
that kept me at Caltech throughout my career was our superb
graduate students and postdocs. I have learned more from them
over the years than they have learned from me. I am grateful
to them for the role they played in nominating me for this
award."

In their letter of nomination, a group of Thorne's former
students wrote, "Graduate physics education is under-appreciated
and often neglected. We hope that the new AAPT Jackson award, and
its acknowledgment of great teachers and textbook writers, like
Kip, will inspire others to follow in his footsteps. We know of no
one who has worked harder on his teaching and his textbooks, and
with greater resulting effect, than our beloved teacher, Kip
Thorne."

Thorne earned his BS from Caltech in 1962 and his PhD from
Princeton University in 1965. He joined the Caltech faculty in 1966
and was promoted to emeritus status in 2009.

Thorne will receive the award in February at the 2012 AAPT
Winter Meeting in Ontario, California.

PASADENA, Calif.—The California Institute of Technology (Caltech) has been awarded $12.6 million in funding over the next five years by the National Science Foundation (NSF) to create a new Physics Frontiers Center. Dubbed the Institute for Quantum Information and Matter (IQIM), the center will bring physicists and computer scientists together to push theoretical and experimental boundaries in the study of exotic quantum states.

Every three years, the NSF selects new Physics Frontier Centers for funding based on their potential for transformational advances in the most promising research areas at the intellectual frontiers of physics. Caltech's IQIM was chosen for funding from more than 50 proposals this year.

The NSF's decision to fund the IQIM leverages the groundwork done by the Center for Exotic Quantum Systems (CEQS), a program funded by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, as well as an earlier NSF-sponsored Institute for Quantum Information (IQI). With the support of the NSF and the Moore Foundation, the new Physics Frontiers Center, CEQS, and IQI will be merged into a single entity—the Institute for Quantum Information and Matter.

"The unrestricted funds provided by the Moore Foundation had a dramatic effect on the decision to fund this Physics Frontiers Center," says Caltech president Jean-Lou Chameau. "That discretionary funding allowed the provost to provide seed money to what might otherwise have been considered a somewhat risky, unconventional field of study. Now, it is one of our most exciting and rapidly growing research initiatives."

Fundamental particles at the atomic level behave according to the laws of quantum physics, which in many respects defy common sense. At this level, individual particles of a composite system can become strongly correlated, or entangled, in such a way that they maintain their relation to one another no matter where they exist in the universe. Such quantum entanglement can endow a system with astonishing properties.

The IQIM will bring together Caltech's established theoretical programs and analytic tools for studying the quantum realm with emerging laboratory capabilities that will allow scientists to delve deeper into quantum entanglement and the unimagined behaviors it may yield. The research is aimed at making advances in basic physics, as well as helping to provide scientific foundations for designing materials with remarkable properties; additionally, this work may eventually help point the way to a quantum computer capable of solving problems that today's digital computers could never handle.

"My colleagues and I believe that an exciting frontier of 21st-century science is the exploration of the surprising phenomena that can arise in highly entangled quantum systems," says H. Jeff Kimble, the William L. Valentine Professor and professor of physics at Caltech, who will direct the IQIM. "The IQIM will provide a sustaining base for our efforts to discover new principles and phenomena at this entanglement frontier."

In addition to Kimble, the Institute for Quantum Information and Matter will be led by three codirectors: Jim Eisenstein, the current director of CEQS and the Frank J. Roshek Professor of Physics and Applied Physics; Oskar Painter, professor of applied physics and executive officer for applied physics and materials science; and John Preskill, the current director of the IQI and the Richard P. Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics.

Studies of quantum entanglement and its applications are necessarily multidisciplinary in nature. Therefore, the 16 Caltech faculty members who will make up the core of the new center are drawn from such disciplines as physics, applied physics, and computer science. The newly renovated historic Norman Bridge Laboratory of Physics and the IQI's home base in the Annenberg Center for Information Science and Technology will serve as two central hubs for IQIM faculty on campus.

"When you bring innovative scientists and engineers together and provide them with the facilities and collaborative spaces they need, magic happens. The magic involves transforming the way we think about and impact our world," says Ares Rosakis, chair of the Division of Engineering and Applied Science (EAS) at Caltech. "I am delighted that an initial collaboration beginning in 2000 between the Division of Engineering and Applied Science (EAS) and the Division of Physics, Mathematics and Astronomy (PMA)—the Institute of Quantum Information (IQI)—planted the seeds for this new NSF institute at Caltech."

PASADENA, Calif.—The California Institute of Technology (Caltech) has been rated the world's number one university in the 2011–2012 Times Higher Education global ranking of the top 200 universities, displacing Harvard University from the top spot for the first time in the survey's eight-year history.

Caltech was number two in the 2010–2011 ranking; Harvard and Stanford University share the second spot in the 2011–2012 survey, while the University of Oxford and Princeton University round out the top five.

"It's gratifying to be recognized for the work we do here and the impact it has—both on our students and on the global community," says Caltech president Jean-Lou Chameau. "Today's announcement reinforces Caltech's legacy of innovation, and our unwavering dedication to giving our extraordinary people the environment and resources with which to pursue their best ideas. It's also truly gratifying to see three California schools—including my alma mater, Stanford—in the top ten."

Thirteen performance indicators representing research (worth 30% of a school's overall ranking score), teaching (30%), citations (30%), international outlook (which includes the total numbers of international students and faculty and the ratio of scholarly papers with international collaborators; 7.5%), and industry income (a measure of innovation; 2.5%) are included in the data. Among the measures included are a reputation survey of 17,500 academics; institutional, industry, and faculty research income; and an analysis of 50 million scholarly papers to determine the average number of citations per scholarly paper, a measure of research impact.

"We know that innovation is the driver of the global economy, and is especially important during times of economic volatility," says Kent Kresa, chairman of the Caltech Board of Trustees. "I am pleased that Caltech is being recognized for its leadership and impact; this just confirms what many of us have known for a long time about this extraordinary place."

"Caltech has been one of California's best-kept secrets for a long time," says Caltech trustee Narendra Gupta. "But I think the secret is out!"

Times Higher Education, which compiled the listing using data supplied by Thomson Reuters, reports that this year's methodology was refined to ensure that universities with particular strength in the arts, humanities, and social sciences are placed on a more equal footing with those with a specialty in science subjects. Caltech—described in a Times Higher Education press release as "much younger, smaller, and specialised" than Harvard—was nevertheless ranked the highest based on their metrics.

According to Phil Baty, editor of the Times Higher Education World University Rankings, "the differences at the top of the university rankings are miniscule, but Caltech just pips Harvard with marginally better scores for 'research—volume, income, and reputation,' research influence, and the income it attracts from industry. With differentials so slight, a simple factor plays a decisive role in determining rank order: money."

"Harvard reported funding increases similar in proportion to other institutions, whereas Caltech reported a steep rise (16%) in research funding and an increase in total institutional income," Baty says.

Data for the Times Higher Education's World University Rankings was provided by Thomson Reuters from its Global Institutional Profiles Project (http://science.thomsonreuters.com/globalprofilesproject/), an ongoing, multistage process to collect and validate factual data about academic institutional performance across a variety of aspects and multiple disciplines.

The California Institute of Technology (Caltech) is a small, private university in Pasadena that conducts instruction and research in science and engineering, with a student body of about 900 undergraduates and 1,200 graduate students. Recognized for its outstanding faculty, including several Nobel laureates, and such renowned off-campus facilities as the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the W. M. Keck Observatory, and the Palomar Observatory, Caltech is one of the world's preeminent research centers.

Astronomers have discovered a supermassive black hole tearing a star to shreds. In late March, NASA's Swift satellite detected flares of X rays and gamma rays from a mysterious source about 3.9 billion light years away. To follow up on the strange signal, astronomers used the 40-meter dish at Caltech's Owens Valley Radio Observatory (OVRO), the Combined Array for Research in Millimeter-wave Astronomy (CARMA)—of which Caltech is a member institution—and other telescopes that observe in centimeter, millimeter, and radio wavelengths. The subsequent data showed that the source is most likely a star being ripped apart by a black hole millions of times more massive than the sun.

"This is a remarkable discovery," says John Carpenter, a senior research associate in astronomy at Caltech and executive director of OVRO. "We are likely witnessing the birth of a jet as a stray star is ripped apart by a massive black hole." The astronomers describe their results in the August 25 issue of the journal Nature.

When the stellar shreds spiral in toward the black hole, which sits at the center of a galaxy, they heat up and produce powerful jets of particles that stream out at nearly the speed of light. Astronomers have predicted that these violent events could happen, and they've seen them before, but only as bright flares in optical, ultraviolet, and X-ray wavelengths.

"When I first saw the CARMA detection, I literally fell out of my chair," says Ashley Zauderer, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who led the team. The astronomers say that this is the first time such a scenario—called a tidal disruption event—has been observed at radio wavelengths, suggesting that scanning the skies for similar radio signals could be a fruitful way to find more stars being devoured by a black hole.

In addition to Carpenter, the Caltech researchers on the team are Shri Kulkarni, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor of Astronomy and Planetary Sciences; graduate students Kunal Mooley, Walter Max-Moerbeck, and Joseph Richards; Nikolaus Volgenau, CARMA assistant director of operations; Tony Readhead, Barbara and Stanley Rawn, Jr., Professor of Astronomy and director of OVRO; and staff scientist Martin Shepherd.